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How British kids escaped World War II horrors in a Palm Beach mansion

Anne, Jean and Alistair Eliot sit at a fountain at the Bethesda-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church in this photo from 1941 or 1942. The three British children waited out the bombing of London at the Palm Beach home of brokerage king Charles Merrill. (Photo courtesy Alistair Elliot)

Posted: 7:30 a.m. Friday, June 02, 2017

PALM BEACH
—

Three young siblings sit at a fountain. Two girls in matching dresses and white floppy bonnets; a lad in a schoolboy’s jacket and shorts. Behind the children, there is a statue of a protecting angel.

Across the sea, their mother pines for her son and two daughters. But she knows they are safer in America than they would be in England. Where, night after night, the full fury of the Nazi war machine rains metal and flame and death on everyone below. Including children.

“This photo shows Alistair, Anne and Jean Elliot one Sunday at a church in Palm Beach called I think Bethesda,” poet and writer Alistair Elliot, now 84, recalled in April via email from northern England.

The children’s emergency host in Palm Beach was Charles Merrill, founder of one of the world’s largest brokerage firms.

They’d expected their stay to be brief. It lasted five years. As long as the war.

Fleeing the Blitz via Palm Beach

Over the years, articles have suggested that British children were brought to Palm Beach County during World War II. Debi Murray, chief curator for the Historical Society of Palm Beach County, found a photo in her archives of children and a woman in Palm Beach, titled simply, “British Children 1940.”

Alistair Elliot says neither he nor his sisters are in the picture. He also knows little about his family’s connections to the Merrills. Charles Merrill, who co-founded Merrill Lynch & Co. in 1914, was born near Jacksonville and once edited the Tropical Sun newspaper in West Palm Beach. As a successful businessman, he split time between New York and his Palm Beach compound, known as “Merrill’s Landing.”

Alistair Elliot in England in August 2014. During World War II, Alistair, then a child, and his sisters Anne and Jean waited out the bombing of London at the Palm Beach home of brokerage king Charles Merrill. (Photo courtesy Alistair Elliot)

Alistair Elliot in England in August 2014. During World War II, Alistair, then a child, and his sisters Anne and Jean ... read more

Merrill descendants also don’t recall much about the Elliots.

“I am unaware as to how or why these three were chosen, but I met them during the summer months when they accompanied my grandfather to Southampton, N.Y.,” Merrill Lynch Magowan, who would have been 2 in 1940, wrote in April from California. “When the war ended, they returned home, and I doubt any member of our family saw them again.”

From September 1940 to May 1941, the Third Reich’s aerial war machine would kill 43,000 civilians. In one 24-day stretch that first month, Germany dropped nearly 6,000 tons of bombs on London.

Even before the raids started, parents started thinking about getting their kids out.

The Elliots first planned to move their three children to Canada, Australia or South Africa.

“At that age,” Alistair Elliot recalled, “this meant a choice between bears, kangaroos and lions, and of course I chose lions.”

But the journey to South Africa never happened.

Starting in June 1940, a board that coordinated childrens’ passage was swamped with applications. And the trip was perilous. The North Atlantic’s infamously treacherous weather and sea conditions were bad enough. But the Nazis had made it clear that British-flagged ships in the open ocean were fair game. Critics said the transports, even with military escorts, were sitting ducks.

Late on the evening of Sept. 17, 1940, the City of Benares was four days out from Elliot’s hometown of Liverpool when a torpedo slammed into it. The attack would kill 131 of the 200 crew members and 131 of the 197 passengers — including 70 of the 90 children fleeing the war.

The loss of the City of Benares would end the government resettlement program. But Roger Kershaw, a veteran researcher for the British National Archives, said privately sponsored programs continued until the end of the war.

Charles Merrill, the Florida country boy who co-founded Merrill Lynch, once worked as a newspaper reporter in West Palm Beach. After he became wealthy, he bought a house in Palm Beach.

Charles Merrill, the Florida country boy who co-founded Merrill Lynch, once worked as a newspaper reporter in West Palm Beach. After ... read more

Elliot says that Charles Merrill’s third wife, Kinta had a friend, possibly a school friend, in Hoylake, Cheshire, near Liverpool. The friend was a patient of a local doctor — Elliot’s father. He said Kinta asked her British friend “if she knew of English children who would like to be taken care of in America.” When his parents got a private invitation from no less than the Merrill dynasty, he said, “they were prepared to consider it.”

Three other children who had planned to come to Palm Beach with the Elliots were unnerved by the sinking of the City of Benares and “decided not to risk it,” Elliot said. But the Elliots and others decided to take up the Merrills’ offer.

“I don’t suppose it would have been accepted if my parents had realized how long the separation would be.”

Known as ‘The Mersey Midgets’

In late November 1940, Elliot, his siblings and mother crossed the Atlantic. Weather was bad during the crossing, which probably hampered U-boats and likely saved the children’s lives, although Elliot said other ships in their convoy were sunk.

“We were attacked at night, and I saw ships burning and heard the destroyers do their whooping rushes past (us) like marine ambulances,” he said.

He said his ship went first to Halifax, then Boston, where Elliot recalled someone from Merrill Lynch met the children. Eventually they relocated to Palm Beach. Alistair was then around eight, and sisters Anne and Jean were 6 and 4. As a nod to the Elliot’s Liverpool-area home, the Merrills nicknamed the three tykes “the Mersey midgets.”

Alistair said his mother stayed long enough to give the three children Christmas presents before returning to England in December 1940 or January 1941.

The children would spend five winters at Merrill’s Landing, a two-story, Victorian-style cottage that stood at 334 North Woods Road, along the Intracoastal Waterway and about a mile and a half north of the Flagler Memorial Bridge.

“I saw ships burning on the horizon, in the Gulf Stream, as we were swimming - and one time we (my sisters and I) got covered with oil that had floated in from a sunk tanker,” he said.

He also recalled seeing a a Messerschmitt 109, “the best German fighter in the Battle of Britain,” on display outside a bank in Palm Beach in 1941, and recalled he was allowed to sit in the cockpit. “The bank was possibly the Chase National and it had automatic doors, a new thing at the time,” he said.

Hammer said Charles welcomed the Elliot siblings “as foster children, seeing not only to their safety but to their upbringing and education.” He even hired them a governess, a British nurse named Jessie Love. Hammer wrote that the three “became an instant family” to Merrill. He said the children called the old man “Mr. Merrill” to his face and “Father Christmas”and “Bonnie Prince Charlie” behind his back.

Hammer’s book says Merrill, the giant of Wall Street, teared up after taking the three to see the film “Snow White.” And that Merrill took Alistair to a boxing match in West Palm Beach, where he witnessed the outrageous practice of placing several black youths in the ring with boxing gloves and having them fight over coins. He wrote that this shocked the boy, and Merrill got him boxing lessons “to prepare him for the bullies back in England who would challenge him…for having spent the war years in America.”

Alistair Elliot, who as a young British child spent World War II at finance giant Charles Merrill’s Palm Beach estate with his two sisters, is shown in a photo with Merrill. (Courtesy Alistair Elliot)

Alistair Elliot, who as a young British child spent World War II at finance giant Charles Merrill’s Palm Beach estate with ... read more

He did provide a photo of himself with Charles Merrill: “He had given me a sort of approximation of an air force uniform for Christmas and I’m helping him with his First World War uniform.”

Hammer’s passages, based mostly on emails from Elliot in 2004, included one in which Elliot recalled a Dec. 27, 1951 letter from Merrill saying in part, “I really gave you more time than I ever had available to give to my own sons.”

Elliot told The Palm Beach Post that Merrill and his wife “were very generous hosts to us until 1945 when there was peace in Europe and we were able to return to England just before the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan and ending the rest of the war.”

One last reunion

Charles Merrill died at 70 on Oct. 7, 1956. “Good Time Charlie” would be remembered little for his generous hosting of the Elliot siblings and more for creating a brokerage empire, for anticipating the 1929 stock market crash, and for his three marriages and numerous affairs, activity he called “recharging my batteries.” He is buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in West Palm Beach.

Son James Merrill would die in February 1995. In June 1992, then 66,, while on a trip to Scotland, he reunited with Elliot, then 60, his old playmate from Long Island and Palm Beach. Elliot said James stopped for a few days after giving a reading at Rotterdam, in the Netherlands.

“I had stayed with him in Connecticut when I revisited the states in 1983. Like his father, he was a generous host. For example, he lent me his smart roadster to drive to Mystic to see the museum there.”

Elliot would published a poetry collection, “My Country,” in 1989. His “Italian Landscape Poems” and his translation of Euripides’ “Medea,” made for the Almeida Theatre and actress Diana Rigg, appeared in 1993. He has published eight books of translation and “Telling the Stones,” a ninth book of his poems came out in May.

Elliot said his sister Anne spent decades teaching in Africa, where anti-malarial tablets damaged her liver; she died in 1975 in Germany at age 41. He said Jean, now an American citizen, is 81 and is in a senior home in Ohio.

At some point, Elliot honored his mother as only a poet can.

He wrote in part, “My mother was a heroine in her own unspoken way. It had to be done, and she did it was all she had to say.”

How we found the Blitz children of Palm Beach

Earlier this year, the Post Time weekly history column ran several segments on the 75th anniversary “window” of World War II and its impact on Florida. In one, Jean Matheson told of her mother-in-law — coincidentally, also Jean Matheson — who was principal of Palm Beach Middle School. Jean also said some British children were brought to Palm Beach for safety. She recalled that the Merrill family had arranged to take perhaps as many as three dozen, but couldn’t be sure, as the story had been passed down verbally. That led to Charles Merrill’s grandson, Peter Magowan of San Francisco, owner of the Giants baseball team. Peter checked with his brother, Merrill Lynch Magowan. Yes, he said. But not 36 children. Just three. He did recall the oldest boy was named Alistair. That led to Yale University professor Langdon Hammer’s biography of Charles Merrill’s son James. An index search of “Alistair” uncovered the boy’s last name. And an email to Hammer produced contact information for Alistair Elliot.

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